Icelandic Charm School

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Do you know the band Seabear?

It is possible that you do and you do not know it if you’ve seen the strange and enthralling Michel Gondry movie The Science of Sleep (kind of a cross between The Life Aquatic or Rushmore and Guillermo del Toro’sPan’s Labyrinth), which featured Seabear’s song “I Sing, I Swim.” But the song that had me at hello was “Arms,” of which there is a delightful homemade video on YouTube. I dare you not be taken in – by the song itself (“you left your dark horse in the stable”), by Ole saying “banjo” and Inga’s rolling of her “r,” and by the anonymous little Martha Graham in the background. (It is a desolate soul that doesn’t have a nook for Seabear.)

Emily Colette Wilkinson
is a staff writer for The Millions living in Virginia. She is a winner of the Virginia Quarterly's Young Reviewers Contest and has a doctorate from Stanford. Her writing has appeared in The Washington Times, In Character, VQR, Arts & Letters Daily, and The Daily Dish.

Blues, country and western, Johnsonian neoclassicism: these are the traditions that nurture Chuck Berry’s lyrical art. But really, who gives a damn about the categories when you’re listening to something as smoking as “Brown Eyed Handsome Man”?

I’m not sure how I knew when Doggystyle would be released. The debut album from Snoop Doggy Dogg -- as Calvin Broadus, Jr. was known before changing his handle to Snoop Dogg, then Snoop Lion, then Snoop Dogg again -- came out in November of 1993, and I can’t imagine that I read about it in any of the newspapers or magazines that cluttered my parents’ house. We didn’t have cable TV, so Kurt Loder didn’t tell me about it, a cartoon globe spinning behind his head. I can only assume that my friends were talking it up: "Snoop Doggy Dogg, from The Chronic? I heard his album’s coming out next week." That was how information spread in 1993. I was 14 years old.
I was also a huge hip-hop fan, with a long and checkered history of signing up for BMG and Columbia House, receiving the first shipment of CDs or cassettes -- nine or 10 of them, an impossible bounty -- before writing them frantic I’m-just-a-child letters when they later demanded their cash. I would buy whatever I could with whatever money I had -- A Tribe Called Quest, N.W.A, Tim Dog; it didn’t matter much. And although I don’t recall loving Dr. Dre’sThe Chronic at the time, I must have been taken by the then-obscure Snoop, who appeared all over it, his silky nihilism leavening Dre’s stern-uncle delivery and the album’s squealing synths. Or maybe I just got swept up in the hype. Either way, I had to have Doggystyle.
There was a CD store one town over that managed to seem simultaneously new and run-down, as if its owners, after hustling to finance its opening, had been too exhausted to properly set it up. Its interior was heavy on milk crates and cardboard signage. It was open for a few months at most, and none of my old friends remember it; when I bring it up, they frown as if I’m describing a poltergeist. But I know that it existed, and that it was open for business on the week of November 23, 1993.
I usually got my music from a shopping mall a few miles out of town, and I’m not sure why I didn’t go there for Doggystyle. I wouldn’t have faked an illness to stay home on the Tuesday of its release -- I only did such a thing once, in the second grade, to obtain a few packs of Garbage Pail Kids’ long-awaited third edition -- so I must have waited until that Saturday, only to find that, for whatever reason, I couldn’t hitch a ride to the mall. I had to take matters into my own smallish hands.
I’d only been in the store once or twice before, and I’d never bought anything there, but it represented my best chance at obtaining Snoop’s debut. My father had recently upped my allowance to a Zuckerbergian $20 a week, so I didn’t have to go through the ordeal of scraping up loose change -- which I’d once done to buy a Bon Jovi cassette (the unlistenable 7800° Fahrenheit). Cash in hand, I likely lied to my parents about where I was going -- playing basketball with friends, not searching for murder-and-misogyny-filled music -- and set out.
It was about a mile and a half to the shop from my childhood home, but as I remember it, the walk had an epic, questing feel. I crossed the busy street perpendicular to my own quiet one and proceeded down a hill that bottomed out near the entrance to a soccer field. On game and practice days, the rutted, tree-hung drive to the field fills with cars; you can hear cheers and murmurs from the open space beyond. But it was too late in the year for soccer, and the place was desolate. The drive peters out at the lip of the field, where the trees recede and the sky seems suddenly huge above the expanse of grass. My first burst of vivid memory of that day occurs here: me, alone, walking towards the woods on the field’s far side. When I think of Doggystyle -- and even when I think of Snoop Dogg -- I think of myself, simmering with teenage need, moving across that empty field.
A slim path wound through a patch of woods into which was hacked the Department of Public Works, its snow plows and pickup trucks parked beside a junk-strewn creek. I curled around an abandoned, graffiti-wracked DPW outbuilding and climbed the metal steps of a bridge that led to a surviving copse of trees. The area had a forgotten, suburban-outlaw feel, the sort of hidden place where '90s kids smoked joints and '80s kids got drunk and — if the tabloids were to be believed — sacrificed their weak in praise of Great Lord Satan.
An overgrown path led through a second field -- three baseball diamonds the merging outfields of which created another soccer pitch -- until I got to the first street, the first real bit of civilization, in the neighboring town. I was almost there. A left, a right, and I was at a car-choked thoroughfare lined with shops. My objective sat wanly on the other side. I crossed the street and entered the store. A little bell might have rung. Of course, I was the only customer.
As I recall, the person behind the counter was a light-skinned black man who wore a tight paisley shirt and oversized glasses, like Get Up With It-era Miles Davis. Though there was never a guarantee of finding what you wanted there, I quickly located Doggystyle — success! — paid, and hurried out, excited to get home and listen to my treasure.
I’d like to say that I recall tearing up to my room, ripping off the disc’s cellophane, and blasting “Gin and Juice” and “Who Am I (What’s My Name?),” but that would be a lie. I have no recollection of actually listening to the album once I returned, or what I even thought of it in subsequent days and weeks. I probably thought, as I do now, that the record was crowded with filler, with too many lackluster skits and too many subpar guests. I don’t know. As is so often the case -- as is maybe always the case -- the getting of the thing was more important than the thing itself.

The rifle-shot drum hit that looses the organ-hymn drone of “Like a Rolling Stone” still sends me back to the small, thin-walled house of my youth, the blaring record part of my father’s Saturday morning ritual, drowning out my morning cartoons. The melancholy of Blood on the Tracks conjures the teary-eyed blur of love lost during arguments on a worn yellow velvet couch, and yet I am happy to have known such misery. These memories will not change for me, though plenty about my life will change between now and my end.
How much has the world changed in the forty-nine years since the 1962 release of Bob Dylan'seponymous debut album? What is the difference between the 1964 wake-up call that "the times they are a changing" and the 2000 pronouncement that "things have changed"? And what of the 2009 premonition from his latest studio album, "I feel a change comin' on"?
The easiest and most common critique of Dylan is his inconsistency. True, the muddled, much maligned material from the "Christian period" does not stand up to the revelatory highs of the iconic songs that pin us to a wave of cultural history and personal emotion that has already crashed on the shore of the past, or do a better job than a mirror of showing us who we are by putting us in the shoes of a jilted lover. The intervening decades have raised the notion of consistency to an ideal, whether we're talking fast-food burgers or internet connectivity. But lurking in everything Dylan has ever done, for better or worse, is the myth of America, its chameleon-like quality to be everything to everybody its greatest asset, permitting openness, not for the sake of change but because of its necessity. This is the history Dylan, who turns 70 years old today, has drawn from to create his own history.
First published in 1925, William Carlos Williams’sIn the American Grain confronts “history”: “It is concerned only with one thing: to say everything is dead . . . History must stay open, it is all humanity.” From the fading echo of Walt Whitman’s chanting in praise of his country, Williams calls out where we as a culture went wrong, how Whitman’s shamanistic energy was bottled into an antidote for a sickness we never felt, though we were told the ailment afflicted us all: "That force is fear that robs the emotions; a mechanism to increase the gap between touch and thing, not to have a contact."
Dylan has kept his ear pressed to Williams’s “back door gossip,” fearlessly transcribing the secrets of the American condition into songs – not Whitman’s chants, more Williams’s rants, gasping in verse, at times not bothering with a chorus, charged with emotion, the byproduct of change. Love, hope, faith, doubt, hubris, death – the challenges and majesties of relationships, which in so much of Dylan are relationships of thoughts, not always bodies in places, but feelings in one’s mind. Yes, the songs brim with sense of place – shadows in meadows; “hot chili peppers in the blistering sun”; lonesome valleys; honeysuckle blooms – and yes, there are people, too – Angel flies in from the coast; Alicia Keys makes a cameo; sisters Mary Anne, Lucy and Betsy are reminded to “pray the sinner’s prayer.” But all of these places and people are of the narrative past, still kicking around in the present, at times with the permanence of a regrettable tattoo: “You try so hard but you don’t understand what you will say when you go home.”
Dylan's interest in change is more about the phases of his life than the cultural changes afoot at any given time. This is why the songs are timeless – we as listeners can situate ourselves in them, both in the lyrics and the sound of the songs, the pure emotional release they enable, whether pangs of heartache or the fancy of running along a “hilltop following a pack of wild geese.” Like any great writer, Dylan forges anew something we take for granted: “The sun’s not yellow it’s chicken."
I don't think Dylan has ever written a song to influence change. But he has long mined that vein of American identity, the one you can't quite see through the skin except when you strain, though if you sit still in a quiet place you can always hear and feel its beat. The themes pounded out have not changed, and in this sense neither has Dylan. He casts his net of perception and pulls in songs. The anger that has bubbled up from Dylan not promoting dissidence during a recent tour of China misses the point of Dylan’s purpose. He sings that you’ve got to serve somebody. He serves himself. This is not to say he is indifferent about injustice, say the arrest of Ai Weiwei, but for all that his words freight, they speak beyond us as individuals, though we listen and make them our own. Writing at Slate, Ron Rosenbaumasks why these critics expected him to sing his most political songs, or do as Bjork did at the end of a 2008 concert there, shouting “Tibet.”
If there is one thing Dylan knows for sure is that one shout, one song, these do not change the world, especially in 2011. Today, if Dylan made his move from acoustic to electric, would the crowds even boo or would they just hold up their phones, uploading their discontent?
Dylan, like Williams, Whitman, and others of their poetic, patriotic ilk, sucks the marrow from America, gnaws on its bones and slurps – not so much concerned with decorum but getting the flavors – the grease stains on his sleeves, the gristle stuck in his teeth, evidence of the contact. These flavors he tastes are not always the same or always enjoyable, but they spring from deep-running sources, some of which are polluted or diverted, but their purity remains unquestionable. Unlike the aforementioned men of letters whose legacies have grown mythical after their deaths, Dylan has lived side-by-side with his own lore, equal parts his creation and the creation of others.
Imagine living a life where people think you did change the world, or that you have the power to change the world. True, for some people, Dylan has changed their world, influenced their personal histories. But how has it impacted the country, the world at large?
Acknowledging that he does pay some attention to what is said about him, Dylan recently addressed the China issue via a post on his website. What is more interesting than his assertion that he in no way was censored by the Chinese government is his closing remark: “Everybody knows by now that there's a gazillion books on me either out or coming out in the near future. So I'm encouraging anybody who's ever met me, heard me or even seen me, to get in on the action and scribble their own book.”
A hyper-political protest singer, a shill for Victoria’s Secret, a seventy-year-old curmudgeon – think whatever you like of him. Write your own history of Bob Dylan, he dares us, it’s the only accurate one that will ever exist.

This isn't the music post I'd planned on writing today. I was going to tell you all about the time a certain British guitar legend from the 60s shouted at me and a friend (yes, at us - specifically at us) across a packed hall in Greenwich Village eleven years ago. I was all set to tell you about that. But that'll have to wait. Another time.You see, I've been sidelined by a contemporary album. This almost never happens. But on Friday I bought Grace/Wastelands, the new solo album from Pete Doherty. I popped it into the CD player when I got home, strapped headphones onto my unsuspecting head, and within seconds I knew I was done for.I'd always had an appreciation for Pete Doherty. Despite all his personal problems and addictions, the few tracks I'd heard from The Libertines and, later, from Babyshambles, I'd liked. I found his writing to be sharp, engaging. But I still wasn't prepared for this. Grace/Wastelands is a masterful album from start to finish. Thoughtful, evocative, musically textured and, above all, beautifully written and sung.It's been about 55 hours since I first put the CD into the player, and virtually every waking hour has been spent listening to it. Even when I was physically elsewhere - with friends or family - I had it going through my head. I was pretty much useless as a friend or son for the last couple of days. I was mentally trying to redirect every conversation toward contemporary music. I wanted to talk about this record, but without getting sidetracked by a discussion about Tabloid Doherty.I wanted to express to people just exactly why their lives were incomplete if they hadn't experienced the sweeping organ in the final minute of "Lady, Don't Fall Backwards," or the way the vocal melody of that song floats down and then up and then down again. I wanted them to experience the opening acoustic strum on "Arcady", the lovely, lilting harmonies that belie the sadness of "Sheepskin Tearaway" and to hear the catch in his voice when he sings the word "scars" near the end of the song. They needed to hear the ragtime piano on "The Sweet By and By". They needed to both hear and feel the rhythmic pulse of "Last of the English Roses" and the way one is left hanging before hearing the final consonant in the phrase "...her Winstons from her Enochs." And, especially, the evocative "Salome" - perhaps the finest song on the album - with great guitar-playing by Doherty and Graham Coxon from Blur who share guitar duties on almost every song on the album. This is an album full of melancholy - sometimes wistful, sometimes painful. Always gently poetic.This level of musical obsession happened frequently when I was younger. In school and in early university I would breathe Beatles and Rolling Stones albums. Then a bit later I would inhale albums by The Kinks and Bob Dylan. In the years that followed, the occasional album would turn into an obsession - but it, too, was generally something from an earlier era. Rarely something contemporary. In the past decade, I can clearly recall the few cases of me obsessing over something current: In The Belly of the Whale by Canadian songwriter Danny Michel, Blur's 13, Michael Penn'sResigned and, especially, each successive release from The Walkmen who hit a new peak last fall with their stunning You and Me (about which - more [much more] in a future post). So it's a pretty limited list. There's nothing fleeting here. Every one of these albums is part of me, even after the initial obsession subsides. And I can add Pete Doherty's Grace/Wastelands to the list.

Practically from the moment that Jeff Tweedy murmured the words "I am an American aquarium drinker," the opening lyric of 2002's Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, an album that re-imagined what a rock album could be, Wilco has enjoyed a position of high prominence in the panoply of American bands. Yankee was rightly hailed as a masterpiece. That first, seven-minute track, "I am Trying to Break Your Heart," is defined by shimmering instrumentals, a lovely, lurching drum signature, and Tweedy's smug-but-vulnerable, slurry vocals. For all their windy nuance, Tweedy's words have a sly-sensitive, penetrating observational clarity, like the ramblings of a heartbroken anthropologist on his sixth beer.
This clarity is a hallmark of Tweedy's songwriting, where imagery is always being melded to emotion. The emotional content in Yankee moves from crankiness to near-suicidal despair, to sentimentality, to a strident refusal to accept an American culture in atrophy. "You have to lose," he sings in "War on War," a driving mid-tempo rock song that is somehow both aggressive and subdued. "You have to learn how to die."
About six weeks ago, Tweedy's primary collaborator on Yankee, the songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Jay Bennett, did die, of an accidental drug overdose. His death came as Wilco was getting set to release its latest effort Wilco (The Album). Bennett was booted from the band right after it completed work on Yankee. The conflict between Tweedy and Bennett is plain to see in Sam Jones's excellent documentary about the making of Yankee, also entitled I am Trying to Break Your Heart. Bennett's death coming shortly before the release of Wilco's new record is a coincidence, but it does reinforce some of the ideas that Tweedy has always been preoccupied with as a songwriter, and sought to communicate. How does one even begin to go about living in this world? Such is the precious agony of time.
Wilco (The Album) attempts to answer that question in as straightforward a manner as a rock band can: the band will be, as Tweedy proclaims in the first track, "A sonic shoulder for you to cry on." The song, "Wilco," is upbeat, self-reverential, and great. "Are times getting tough? / Are the roads you travel rough? / Have you had enough of the old? / Tired of being exposed to the cold?" Tweedy stacks up the interrogatives like blocks before knocking them over: "Stare at your stereo / Put on your headphones before you explode / Wilco / Wilco / Wilco will love you baby." It's a funny sort of braggadocio that is somehow more heartfelt than solipsistic. Seven years on from the brilliant, narcotized dysphoria of Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, Tweedy seems to have arrived at a place where he is willing to not try and do too much - and maybe not reach quite as far - but the results are still rewarding for the listener. Also, as another critic pointed out, the song does have an oddly Velvet Underground feel, which becomes an ironic theme of Wilco (the Album), its very title such an on-the-nose stamp of individuality: some of the songs consciously reference songs that have come before.
I should pause here to talk a bit about Wilco the band. The collection of musicians has changed and expanded over the years. The holdovers from the Yankee days are bassist John Stirratt and drummer Glenn Kotche. Stirratt is great, but, as a drummer myself, I must take a moment to give Kotche his due. He may be the most tasteful drummer out there, possessing great instincts for both density and space, and the odd quality of power in restraint. Unfortunately, the drum parts on Wilco (the Album) don't always showcase his ability (and I also felt that especially on later tracks they are recorded in a sort of heavy way that I didn't especially dig), but if you doubt my assessment of Kotche's virtuosity, pick up Yankee and give the drums a good listen. You'll see what I mean.
The lineup is rounded out by keyboardists/multi-instrumentalists Pat Sansone and Mikael Jorgenson, and guitarist Nels Cline. Cline is stalwart. He got his first opportunity to really stretch out in 2004's A Ghost Is Born, the follow-up to Yankee and an excellent album in its own right (See comment below for correction--Jim O'Rourke played lead guitar on Ghost.) The two talented multi-instrumentalists in the band round out the sonic palette nicely, but an essential ingredient to both Wilco's mastery of the straight-no-chaser rock form and its ability to be experimental is Cline's guitar playing.
If Ghost was more of a driving rock record, then 2007's Sky Blue Sky was more contemplative and more musically experimental. The album contained the seeds of the kinder, gentler Jeff Tweedy that is in evidence on Wilco (The Album).
For this latest record, Tweedy seems ready to accentuate the positive, even if that old bleak outlook does occasionally cloud over the proceedings. "Deeper Down" showcases some pretty work from Cline on the pedal steel guitar, and the surprising and playful surge of a harpsichord, played by Sansone. "One Wing" is a ballad centered on a delicate guitar lick and a characteristically spacious and imaginative drum part from Kotche. "You were a blessing, and I was a curse / I did my best not to make things worse / for you," sings Tweedy. So the old angst isn't entirely gone. "Bull Black Nova" gets us back into the warm lap of mid-tempo rock, with nice interlocking guitar lines followed by a quirky call-and-response instrumental layout that seems to involve the whole band in successive bursts. It's a song about a car -- with blood all over the trunk. One thing I always enjoy when listening to Wilco is how much power they can conjure in their sound without being heavy-handed in terms of volume and dynamics. The instruments are balanced and play off one another. It's cleverly orchestrated music with the right rough touches. For "You and I," the mood shifts to acoustic, and Tweedy shares the vocals with Leslie Feist. It's a solid song, if a bit twee for me.
The most intriguing oddity on Wilco (The Album) is track six, "You Never Know." It's the most referential song of the bunch, borrowing almost exactly from Sly Stone's "Everyday People" for its foundation groove. It's Sansone and Jorgenson's time to bring it, with a dense, pulsing fusillade of piano and Hammond organ, and Kotche leans into the groove. Incorporated into the guitar solo and final choruses is a note-for-note reproduction of George Harrison's descending guitar lick from "My Sweet Lord." Of all the songs on the album, this one is growing on me the fastest. "All you fat followers get fit fast / Every generation thinks it's the last / Thinks it's the end of the world," Tweedy chides. "I don't care anymore, I don't care anymore / You never know."
Wilco (The Album) is a good record from a great band. If it doesn't quite finish as well as it starts, well, that's okay. The back end of the album is more a tribute to the band's pre-Yankee, Uncle Tupelo roots - some down-home-sounding, catchy numbers. It concludes with an anthemic, almost schmaltzy love song, "Everlasting Everything," that's a bit overwrought. But there's so much to chew over on this record. As always, the band sounds lush and lithe, and the words and music exist in a rare harmony.
In the end, a record that at first blush seems oddly self-centered is mostly outward-pointing. When Tweedy proclaims that "Wilco will love you baby," the effect is suitably seductive.